Chatham District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit develops prioritization tool to review cases
The Chatham County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), in partnership with the Georgia Innocence Project (GIP), has developed a “prioritization tool” to assist in screening cases of individuals who claim they’ve been wrongfully convicted in Chatham County.
The purpose of the CIU is to review cases for a potentially wrong conviction and to understand how and why the wrongful convictions took place, so as to prevent them from happening again, explained Jones.
Why was the CIU created?
The unit was created as a result of a grant awarded in November 2021 grant by the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance to the Georgia Innocence Project (GIP) and the Chatham DA’s Office. After the GIP and DA’s Office filled CIU positions in July and August 2022, the CIU began its work. The grant expires this September.
“Chatham County’s history of wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice, reflected by its disproportionate representation among the National Registry of Exonerations (20% of Georgia exonerations), creates a heightened risk of error in Chatham County cases,” the DOJ noted in the grant, adding that two of Georgia’s three death row exonerations originated in Chatham County.
The creation of the CIU came as “a wave of new prosecutors was elected across Georgia, eager to implement substantive reform,” including Jones, according to the grant.
In the United States since 1989, there have been 3,338 exonerations of wrongfully convicted people. In Georgia, there have been 48 exonerations of wrongfully convicted people. In Chatham County, there have been nine known exonerations of wrongfully convicted people.
Despite the number of exonerations, CIUs are not particularly common nationwide or statewide. There are 122 CIUs nationwide and three CIUs in Georgia, while there are 2,300 prosecutor offices, according to Jones.
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What is the purpose of the prioritization tool?
The intent of the DOJ grant was to create a tool to prioritize the requests for review the office might receive before an influx of requests comes in. The tool is based on a point system; the more points, the higher priority the DA’s Office will place on the case.
The progress of the conviction integrity unit comes as Jones secured a resounding victory in the May 21 Democratic primary for Chatham County District Attorney with 73.1% of the vote. Her opponent, former Assistant District Attorney Jenny Parker, garnered 4,347 votes, or 26.90%, of the overall tally. Jones will face Republican Andre Pretorius, a former deputy chief assistant for the Chatham County State Court, in the November general election. He works now on a part-time basis as an attorney for Chatham County government.
In a late March Q&A and in a late April candidate forum hosted by the League of Women’s Voters of Coastal Georgia, Jones touted her track record, spotlighting the implementation of multiple key units, including the CIU, while Parker criticized Jones for the deterioration of such units.
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Which Chatham County cases has the DA’s Office and the GIP reviewed?
After the grant was awarded, former CIU director and then-Chatham ADA Michael Edwards began completing the initial work of the unit, establishing policies and procedures. Edwards left the Chatham DA’s Office in February 2023.
Then, in August 2022, Jones's office hired Brooke Donner as the paralegal for the unit. In partnership with the GIP, Donner was tasked with reviewing all known Chatham County exonerations.
“I try to touch a case everyday, to look through it, to try to find information,” said Donner. "We want to get to a point where we're teaching our prosecutors how to look out for the different wrongful conviction factors, and hopefully working with law enforcement, too.”
The National Registry of Exonerations contains a list of nine exonerations involving seven cases from Chatham County:
1. Earl Charles, who was convicted in 1975 and sentenced to death for the Oct. 3, 1974 murder of father and son Max and Fred Rosenstein at the Savannah Furniture Company, which the Rosensteins owned. After serving three years and seven months on death row, Charles was exonerated in 1978. After two trials, Charles settled his lawsuit against the City of Savannah for $75,000.
2. Jim Williams, who was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to life for the May 2, 1981, murder of his assistant, 21-year-old Danny Hansford. His case would go on to become the subject of the bestselling book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. On May 9, 1989, a jury acquitted Williams.
3. Trevor Cannon, who was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to eight years in prison for the Feb. 22, 2013, car crash that led to the death of 29-year-old Stephen Joyner, and his 31-year-old wife, Camie, serious injuries to the Joyners's three-year-old daughter, and a 47-year-old motorcyclist. Prosecutors dismissed the charges on Jan. 2, 2018. The Savannah City Council approved a $300,000 settlement for Cannon in 2020.
4. Gary Nelson, who was convicted in 1980 and was sentenced to death for the Feb. 20, 1978 rape, sodomy and stabbing murder of 6-year-old Valerie Armstrong. Nelson was released on Nov. 6, 1991.
6. Kenneth Gardiner, Mark Jones and Dominic Lucci, who were convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life plus five years in prison for the Jan. 31, 1992 murder of Stanley Jackson near the intersection of 33rd and East Broad streets. On July 12, 2018, the prosecution dismissed the charges. In May 2021, Governor Brian Kemp signed legislation that awarded $1 million in compensation each for Lucci, Jones and Gardiner.
7. Douglas Echols and Samuel Scott, who were convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery for the Feb. 1, 1986 rape of a young woman who was leaving a Savannah nightclub. Echols served five years in prison and was released on parole in 1992. Scott was released on parole in September 2001 but was arrested two days later when he failed to register as a sex offender. He was released on electronic monitoring after a month in prison. He was incarcerated again in April 2002 for not being able to pay the monthly electronic monitoring fee.
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What are the basic requirements for a case to be reviewed by the CIU?
As Donner explained, the process to get the prioritization tool off the ground has been arduous. There were about 40 boxes of files related to the 11 exonerations. The CIU was tasked with scanning the files ― which included police reports, witness statements, and court testimony ― into PDFs.
The Quattrone Center at the University of Pennsylvania served as the training and technical advisor for the grant. The Quattrone Center is a national research and policy hub created to catalyze long-term structural improvements to the US criminal justice system. The organization hosted monthly webinars, where they had an expert teach about topics such as investigative interviewing, proper eyewitness identification methods, and signs of potentially false confessions, said Donner.
Then, Donner, along with multiple GIP attorneys and The Quattrone Center, highlighted wrongful conviction factors, such as law enforcement misconduct, eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, or debunked forensic science.
Jones said the CIU has received 30 requests for review from defendants and/or their families asking the unit to review their cases. To qualify for a CIU review, according to a brochure provided by the Chatham DA’s office, a case must fulfill three categories;
Felony conviction prosecuted by the Chatham DA’s Office;
Direct appeal in the case has become final and there is no pending appeals litigation;
Claim is of actual innocence, and the defendant did not commit the crime and played no role in it.
However, a “little over half” of the requested cases have been “screened out” because they don’t meet the basic eligibility requirements, said Donner.
“We were already getting phone calls from people asking for us to look at their cases, which we want to do, but we want to have the right steps in place, the protocols in place, so we’re not misstepping, or missing something that we shouldn’t have,” said Donner.
Donner said she has sent out applications to “half a dozen” defendants, but the CIU has not “received information back yet.” Donner added that there are another dozen cases the CIU is “trying to look into.”
Donner declined to comment on what cases they are reviewing, citing ongoing investigations.
“I'm going to go back through now with those cases that we've gotten and try to apply that to it and see how we can focus the resources we have,” said Donner.
The unit is now overseen by Chief Assistant ADA Geoffrey Alls. After Donner reviews the case, the files are passed along to Alls, who screens the case to see if the case fits the “basic eligibility factors.”
Then, if it meets the basic eligibility factors, Alls makes a recommendation to Jones on which cases they should take, and how they should prioritize them. Alls and Jones then have a conversation. “Do we currently have the resources to seek to overturn this conviction?” asked Jones. “Do we currently have enough staff or not?”
What are CIU's next steps?
“Should the unit continue (either through grant or county funding), the goal would be to present the case to a review committee for further action,” Jones wrote in an email.
With the grant for the Chatham DA’s Office to keep Donner expiring in September, Jones said she has asked the Chatham County Board of Commissioners to make Donner a permanent part of the office staff.
“One of the things that makes Brooke the best candidate for the work is because she has a background in research and policy,” said Jones. “The other thing that makes her critically important is that she's very well connected with the justice-minded agencies and entities that will help her to do this work in the future.
“We need a much bigger staff to review those cases and to be responsive to the community,” said Jones. “So, we've been reluctant to take cases under the CIU, but that doesn't mean that our commitment to conviction integrity stops.”
Drew Favakeh is the public safety and courts reporter for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at AFavakeh@Gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Chatham DA's integrity team reviews potential wrongful convictions
